As if Pakistan did not already face enough dangers, General Zia-ul-Haq has added one more which may well turn to be the gravest of them all. He has ordered the introduction of the so-called Islamic laws without securing the concurrence of the Shias who claim to account for one-third of the country’s population – around 25 million. Their two representatives in the Islamic Ideology Council had raised some serious objections to the proposed laws which had been disregarded by the others in utter disregard of the fact that such explosive issues cannot be settled on the basis of numerical majority. While General Zia could not be blamed for this insensitivity on the part of the sunni mullahs, as head of the government he was under an obligation to take note of the differences and postpone the introduction of the laws in question. He did nothing of the kind. On the contrary he tried to make it appear that the Islamic Ideology Council had unanimously approved of the proposed changes.
As a correspondent of The Guardian, London, in Pakistan has put it, the main complaint of the Shias relates to zakat (wealth tax) which is to be enforced in July. According to him, “the Shias say that zakat is payable on nine items, which include dates, camels and buffaloes, as well as gold and silver; no zakat is payable, they insist, on ornaments of gold and silver; nor on pieces of art and decoration made of gold, nor on paper currency nor on savings certificates and prize bonds.” He adds: ‘ There are other, more gruesome differences between the sects. The Shia leaders say, for example, that the punishment of wrist amputation ordered in the case of theft is a sunni punishment. The Shia view requires the hand to be cut at the joints of the fingers.”
The issue in all this is not whether there is more to be said in favour of the sunni or the shia mullahs. Both viewpoints are horrible beyond words. These must depress reasonably well educated Pakistanis even more than they must depress all those who wish that country well. This would have been the case even if this extremely painful and disastrous retrogression was the result of a popular upsurge, as is widely believed to be the case in Iran, though one should not take it for granted that the Iranian people in fact want to go that far back into the past. For, it is possible that in their struggle against the Shah’s tyrannical and in many respects senseless rule, the people, including the intelligentsia, leaned on the ayatollahs not because the former accepted the social philosophy of the latter but because they had nowhere else to turn for leadership. But in Pakistan, there has in any case not been anything like a popular movement favouring a return to the past. General Zia has managed to impose his bigoted views on a leaderless people. And it now turns out that he has done so in disregard of the views of the shias. Thus while his continued stay in office cannot but harm Pakistan, there does not appear to be any hope that he is about to be replaced by someone who is saner, and more in tune with the spirit of the age.
The Times of India, 2 March 1979